| 19:25
Firefighting Aircraft DC-10 Air Tanker
Five seconds after the plane dropped its load from 200 feet up, the sound of water displacing air murmured over the pale grass, stunted brush and cowpies toward seven observers on the ground. There are five companies in the United States that employ large, fixed-wing aircraft for aerial firefighting; more that use smaller aircraft; and some public agencies that own their own firefighting planes. But 10 Tanker is the only company that uses the giant DC-10, which is more than 170 feet long and has a wingspan of more than 155 feet, to fight fires. “You get the temperature down and the humidity up,” Rick Hatton, one of the observers, said as the rumble of the DC-10’s engines receded in the distance. “You get out there early, get it done, get it out, so the fire never gets a name, never gets in the newspaper.”Flying low over scrub and dusty truck trails, the big DC-10 jet dropped a load of water onto a Laguna Pueblo cattle pasture, banked left, grabbed some altitude and disappeared, obscured by the wet cloud left hanging in its wake.
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